Founded by an ex-Cisco engineer with a passion for fantasy football, Automated Insights (AI) takes large volumes of data and turns it into English prose. You read that right. As they say: “It’s like an expert talking with each user in plain English.” AI automates the process of writing simple reports based on data streams, a job that today is usually in the hands of a very bored junior analyst.

2. Beckon — San Mateo, CA

Like AI, Beckon wants to help marketers meet the challenge of swelling data volumes and variety, combined with their own limited capacity to process reports and gain insight from the swells. Calling themselves “a partner to clean up the data mess,” they offer a solution that basically consumes standard reports from other systems, pulls data from APIs, blenderizes and reformats, and creates a central repository of normalized, structured, useful information. Beckon proudly calls itself “middleware.”

3. CivicScience — Pittsburgh, PA

Their business is quite simple: they have a lot of publisher partners who offer up real estate on their websites, and CivicScience serves up little consumer research surveys, mixed with pop culture and other questions for fun. On the back end, the company maintains what is essentially an always-on syndicated demographic and attitudinal survey that maps individual users (based on browser cookies) to all the answers they have given, over time. In this way, CivicScience provides a bite-sized way to deliver surveys to consumers that is perfectly suited to combat the anti-survey mentality plaguing brand consumer research.

The business of marketing has moved from guesswork to a data operation in the cloud, or at least that is what Adobe and Oracle would have you believe. In the last few days, both of these tech giants have announced ...

The imminent introduction of self-driving cars will profoundly change our cities, often in unpredictable ways. To deal with this, Congress must completely rewrite the rulebook for regional transportation planning.

Singularity HubSoftware Bot Produces Up To 10000 Wikipedia Entries Per DaySingularity HubSince October of 2011, Narrative Science has been automatically generating sports and finance stories on Forbes without much fanfare.

PropertyCasualty360Commercial property underwriting embraces new tools and players through ...PropertyCasualty360Those carriers leading the charge have become early adopters of automated decision support (ADS) strategies.

Useful analogies will eventually develop between the Federal regulation of robotic aviation and of robotic cars. None are presented in the essay above, but you can begin to understand where parallels may exist by digging into what's going on with FAA rule making:

Are Algorithms Replacing Reporters?PSFKThis push for personalized content is shared by the developers of Automated Insights' Wordsmith, who propose an entirely new perspective on, and set of expectations from, the future shape of news.

Last April, President Barack Obama assembled some of the nation's most august scientific dignitaries in the East Room of the White House. Joking that his grades in physics made him a dubious candidate for "scientist in chief," he spoke of using technological innovation "to grow our economy" and unveiled "the next great American project": a $100 million initiative to probe the mysteries of the human brain.

Along the way, he invoked the government's leading role in a history of scientific glories, from putting a man on the moon to creating the Internet. The Brain initiative, as he described it, would be a continuation of that grand tradition, an ambitious rebuttal to deep cuts in federal financing for scientific research.

"We can't afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the world races ahead," Obama said.

"We have to seize them. I don't want the next job-creating discoveries to happen in China or India or Germany. I want them to happen right here."

Absent from his narrative, though, was the back story, one that underscores a profound change taking place in the way science is paid for and practiced in America. In fact, the government initiative grew out of richly financed private research: A decade before, Paul G. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, had set up a brain science institute in Seattle, to which he donated $500 million, and Fred Kavli, a technology and real estate billionaire, had then established brain institutes at Yale, Columbia and the University of California. Scientists from those philanthropies, in turn, had helped devise the Obama administration's plan.

American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise.

In Washington, budget cuts have left the nation's research complex reeling. Labs are closing. Scientists are being laid off. Projects are being put on the shelf, especially in the risky, freewheeling realm of basic research. Yet from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, science philanthropy is hot, as many of the richest Americans seek to reinvent themselves as patrons of social progress through science research.

The result is a new calculus of influence and priorities that the scientific community views with a mix of gratitude and trepidation.

The short version: the above graphic is the latest incarnation of my marketing technology landscape supergraphic (click for a high-resolution 2600×1950 version, 4.7MB). It represents a whopping 947 different companies that ...

If you’ve spent any time reading on the web the past week, odds are you’ve read something written by a robot—and you didn’t even realize it. But what are the limitations of robot writers? And can they help your brand newsroom?

Journalist Clive Thompson has published an enlightening piece at Medium.com that shows us how we can tell the difference between a snail-mail letter that has been written by a robot and one that has been written by an actual human being.

AutoGrid Systems analyzes the exponentially expanding wave of data being generated by smart meters, building management systems, voltage regulators, thermostats and other equipment so utilities and end-users can obtain precise insight into where power is going and enact automated, responsive controls.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.